Agile methods have gained popularity due to their ability to cope with unstable requirements throughout the development life cycle, improving communication between developers and customers, and delivering products in shorter time frames, when compared to traditional development methods. These adaptive and flexible methods, relying on a set of best practices that are considered to increase quality, completely redefine quality assurance work, from formal roles to day-to-day activities. The developers, following a set of best practices, such as planning game or sprint planning, test driven development (TDD) or test first development (TFD) and refactoring, pair programming, continuous integrations, customer collaboration, etc., create value and assure quality through all the development phases, from requirements to the final release. Many empirical studies support and evangelize the advantages of agile methods and their practices with respect to quality and some of them will be presented in this thematic track.

The first paper, by K. Korhonen, reports on the positive effects of going agile in a large organization as far as defect management is concerned. The author presents the results of a case study conducted in a large software development organization. Data on defects have been collected and two surveys were conducted to conclude the analysis. The two analyzed aspects are changes to defect data and reporting practices.

The second paper, by P. Sfetsos and I. Stamelos, presents a systematic literature review on quality of agile practices, based on empirical results published in the literature. The authors try to answer two questions: 1) what is the current state of knowledge on quality in agile practices? and 2) which are the most significant practices for achieving quality in agile development? Three main categories were identified as: test driven development or test first development and refactoring, pair programming and other practices.

In the third paper, H. Landim et al. address an important problem of attempting to better understand agile methods and the procedures and conditions that affect them. The paper presents the results of a survey conducted in industry with 19 people, consisting of project managers, architects, product managers and developers with experience in using Agile methods. The goal of the survey was to study a list of procedures and conditions captured from the literature, which are said to influence positively, the deployment of agile practices.

The forth paper, by J.M. Fernandes and M. Almeida, deals with the interesting issue of assessing and comparing agile methods. Authors approach the problem in a systematic way, on the basis of solid background, such as SWEBOK and Agile Manifesto. They present a decision-making framework for assessing the agility and degree of software engineering coverage of agile methods. They employ their approach to compare XP and SCRUM.

The fifth paper, by G. Kakarontzas and I. Stamelos, addresses the subject of reusability in agile methods. The authors, based on the iterative development process, propose a software process improvement technique for agile software development emphasizing reusable software components, calling this approach “component recycling”. These components are placed in a component repository for later recycling.

Finally, the sixth paper by S. Kollanus focuses on the potential fruitful future of the Test-Driven Development (TDD). The author presents a systematic literature review in order to analyze the current empirical evidence on TDD. The review is focused on external and internal quality and productivity.

In summary, the papers in this track cover many different aspects and approaches on quality in agile methods. The findings of these studies are expected to help developers, managers and researchers, in the field of agile methods, to better understand how to approach quality issues when implementing the agile methods and their practices.